Hi all,
first of all I want to thank everybody involved into the gentoo-mips-project for the great work that was done so far. After some drawbacks due to my incompetence I've just finished my own setup on a SGI-O2 with kernel 2.6.13.4 mips64, arcboot 3.8.4

What works:
- The kernel gives output to a 1600sw flat-panel adapter if SetLoadOptions is set to "video=1280x1024-16@60". Unfortunately i cannot get it to work at 1600x1024, which is the panels native mode. I guess this is due to the fact, that the fb-device still only supports 4MB.

- X11 didn't start up when i first emerged it, cause USE="dlloader" was missing. Thanks to geoman for the tip! (although I don't understand, what dlloader is good for). The X11 fb-driver, to my surprise, works great at 1600x1024-15. If I set up to 1600x1024-16 the underlaying palette gets corrupted and i have some really strange "rainbow"-effects.

- Xfce 4.1.1.2-r4 works
- kvirc 3.2.0 works

Problems:
I've found, that after some hours the atkbd driver gets corrupted. I don't know what causes this behaviour, 'cause when the machine e.g. compiles, i usually only press "shift"
from time to time, to recover the terminal's screen blanker. I found tons of these messages at syslog-ng:

What I found somewhat irritating when doing the setup:
- The Gentoo-Mips-Handbook is imho a bit too unspecific at this time. I know there are quite a lot different machines running on mips. Therefore it might be better to provide some separate subcategories e.g. for O2, Indy and so on. At this time i doubt anyone could set up it's own kernel / arcboot installation by just following the instructions of the handbook. As for building the (64bit O2-)kernel, a short Mini-HowTo would be wonderful, including the hint to emerge gcc-mips64 FIRST.
The same goes for arcboot. A great help was the arcboot-micro-howto which solved my problems.

From here:
I'd really like to see mozilla-firefox running on my machine, but for now the ebuild failes to emerge.
The kernel doesn't provide any drivers for onboard audio of an O2, so I'll probably install an old pci soundcard of mine. Has anyone done this before?

What works:
- The kernel gives output to a 1600sw flat-panel adapter if SetLoadOptions is set to "video=1280x1024-16@60". Unfortunately i cannot get it to work at 1600x1024, which is the panels native mode. I guess this is due to the fact, that the fb-device still only supports 4MB.

This is using the flat-panel adaptor for O2 and not routing VGA to a multilink device then out to the flatpanel?

UltraHarry wrote:

- X11 didn't start up when i first emerged it, cause USE="dlloader" was missing. Thanks to geoman for the tip! (although I don't understand, what dlloader is good for). The X11 fb-driver, to my surprise, works great at 1600x1024-15. If I set up to 1600x1024-16 the underlaying palette gets corrupted and i have some really strange "rainbow"-effects.

I believe this is tied to something funky with Xorg and module loading. Geoman knows all the details on it, but I know it's not pretty.

UltraHarry wrote:

- Xfce 4.1.1.2-r4 works
- kvirc 3.2.0 works

If these aren't keyworded ~mips or mips already, file a bug so we can keyword them.

UltraHarry wrote:

What I found somewhat irritating when doing the setup:
- The Gentoo-Mips-Handbook is imho a bit too unspecific at this time. I know there are quite a lot different machines running on mips. Therefore it might be better to provide some separate subcategories e.g. for O2, Indy and so on. At this time i doubt anyone could set up it's own kernel / arcboot installation by just following the instructions of the handbook. As for building the (64bit O2-)kernel, a short Mini-HowTo would be wonderful, including the hint to emerge gcc-mips64 FIRST. ;-)
The same goes for arcboot. A great help was the arcboot-micro-howto which solved my problems.

One of the things on our list is to get out some kind of "approved" generic kernel configs that will contain something like the bare minimum drivers/options for a system. These would facilitate the configuring of a kernel better. Alternatively, there should be machine-specific configs in arch/mips/config, but those can sometimes vary on what is and isn't enabled.

Arcboot is also on it's way out. We're keeping it around as some users prefer it, but arcload is (in my opinion) a better bootloader. It only lacks the ability to read filesystems in its current iteration, requiring the kernels and the config file to be stored in the volume header. Maybe this'll change in the future, though. The forthcoming update to the Handbook will include a section on the two different styles of configs for both bootloaders.

UltraHarry wrote:

From here:
I'd really like to see mozilla-firefox running on my machine, but for now the ebuild failes to emerge.
The kernel doesn't provide any drivers for onboard audio of an O2, so I'll probably install an old pci soundcard of mine. Has anyone done this before?

Mozilla is considered broken on mips. There's a linker bug in binutils (I believe) which seems to prevent the browser component from building. Some of the debian devs have managed to get a working binary up, but I believe it has its own problems. One of our devs did manage, in one case, to successfully compile it and it apparently worked well, except it inversed the colors on PNG images. However, it'll remain listed as broken until we successfully nail that linker bug.

What works:
- The kernel gives output to a 1600sw flat-panel adapter if SetLoadOptions is set to "video=1280x1024-16@60". Unfortunately i cannot get it to work at 1600x1024, which is the panels native mode. I guess this is due to the fact, that the fb-device still only supports 4MB.

This is using the flat-panel adaptor for O2 and not routing VGA to a multilink device then out to the flatpanel?

Yes, I'm using the adaptor. Do you think this adaptor causes those problems? I always thought, the adaptor is just an analog/digital-convertor. Does it have it's own framebuffer?_________________don't let the SUN go down on me (george michael) - www.hasipara.de